Judicial Ideology and Appointments at the European Court of Justice: Evidence from the Attitudes at the ECJ Survey (AECS)

Due to the lack of dissenting opinions and public votes at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), little is known about the ideal points held by its judges. Instead, most research assumes a black box court with homogeneous integrationist and market-liberal preferences. The absence of empirical attitudinal data made it virtually impossible to study the extent to which the ideological congruence between ECJ judges and governments influences their appointments. To overcome the data scarcity, we asked over 300 experts of European law to assess the orientations held by ECJ judges across several dimensions of the European judicial policy space. According to the surveyed experts, ECJ judges indeed hold integrationist preferences, but their attitude toward market intervention are quite diverse and centrist on average. Moreover, ECJ judges also tend to be culturally progressive. Our regression analysis reveals a significant but very small relation between judicial attitudes and government ideology at the time of appointment. Using new empirical data on national nomination procedures, we tentatively link the apolitical nature of the appointment decisions to domestic institutional filters and the retention of judges in positions of authority.